


She's made of outer space

by heavenisalibrary



Series: Tumblr Prompt Fills [8]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Ficlet, River as a Time Lady from Gallifrey AUish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-20
Updated: 2014-03-20
Packaged: 2018-01-16 09:36:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1342645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavenisalibrary/pseuds/heavenisalibrary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s a miracle, plain and simple. Slipped through the cracks of space and time, a bit of stardust and recycled seconds from the time-lock. Her hair smells like ozone when he presses his nose into it and her palms feel like the milky way as he molds his hand into hers. When he closes his eyes and she kisses him, he can taste the rains of Gallifrey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She's made of outer space

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "Doctor/river au: river is a full time lady, born and raised on Gallifrey."

She’s a miracle, plain and simple. Slipped through the cracks of space and time, a bit of stardust and recycled seconds from the time-lock. Her hair smells like ozone when he presses his nose into it and her palms feel like the milky way as he molds his hand into hers. When he closes his eyes and she kisses him, he can taste the rains of Gallifrey.

He could subsist off of the press of her lips to his, off of the way her eyelashes feel against his cheek as she drops from her tiptoes; he could drink in the sight of her, curves like an old earth goddess and eyes spitting with the fire of his people he’d thought he extinguished, and never be thirsty, he could live and die in her embrace and never mind a second of it. He could write odes to her, sonnets, songs — he could write an endless epic poem in Old High Gallifreyan, a language long dead, and kiss her to give it life on her tongue.

He doesn’t know how she slipped through that hole in the world he tries not to think about, the one he falls into on bad days and can’t climb out of; he doesn’t know how she escaped his destruction, his deconstruction of his whole species, but he’s never been more glad. The moment she removed those bio-dampener earrings and the full, heady realization had come to him — she smelled like jasmine, always, but it was only without the earrings that he realizes it wasn’t jasmine at all. Without the dampeners, he recognizes it as madevinia aridosa, the little red flowers that used to grow in the deep of Gallifreyan deserts, soft to the touch and bioluminescent in the dark; they bloomed after the rain and lived for no time at all before curling back into the sand — but he hasn’t smelled that in years, he wonders where she got her perfume, or if that’s just River, bright and soft and quick.

He wants to lay her down and gently open her up, to reach inside of her and pull out all of her secrets and stories and kiss all of her hurts better, to count each bone, the read the ley lines of her veins and arteries and memorize how they all connect to her hearts. He wants to break himself open and press his hearts to hers, because what’s the point of two hearts if they can’t beat in tandem?

He wants to know where she grew up, who her parents were, if she laid under the same red-gold sunsets that he did and watched the same grey clouds rush over the copper moon, if she watched Gallifrey catch on fire early in the morning and stretched her arms toward the sky, trying to touch it. He wants to know who her first kiss was, her first love, her first fight — he wants her to tell him about the Time Lords, because he hates them, but he might love them in her voice. He wants to know if she was older or younger than him, if perhaps they’d been in the Academy together and never known, ships passing on their way to and from disciplinary hearings. 

He squeezes his eyes shut as she presses her palms to his cheeks, and thinks about Cadonwood forests, oceans of silver whispering in a sweet-scented breeze.

He thinks all of this in half a second, maybe less, and none of it makes it past his lips. Instead, when he opens his eyes, all he can say is, “how?”

"Oh, my love," she says, "it’s a long story. Can’t be told, has to be lived."

"You’re a —"

"Time Lord," she says, "from Gallifrey."

“ _How_? I — I —”

She cuts him off, pressing her lips to his in a swift kiss.

"You didn’t," she says, "you never could."

She kisses him again, and kisses him and kisses him, until the only thought in his mind is of the endless mountains of Solace and Solitude, and how, for all of the advancements of Gallifrey, one could never touch both at the same time.


End file.
